The new, social rules of customer service

• The oldest marketing adage that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is now firmly outdated
• The shift towards open, public conversation with customers offers companies new opportunities, but also new challenges

Customer service has traditionally been a one-to-one conversation between a company and their customer, taking place within the safe confines of an email thread or telephone call. Now that many large companies are taking their customer support efforts onto Twitter and other social platforms, community and operations managers are grappling with the implications of doing their job in public.

This shift towards open, public conversation with customers offers companies new opportunities, but also new challenges.

Customer support is marketing

Companies have always touted their customer service credentials - "95% would recommend us to a friend!", "Four out of five rate our service as "Excellent!" their websites say; but how much more powerful is it if a potential client can see your customer service in action?

The payoff for investing time engaging with your social customers is that they will reward you with recommendations should your product or service warrant it - a separate study found that 79% of Twitter followers and 60% of Facebook fans are likely to recommend brands they interact with. For the first time good customer service can have a direct and immediate impact on customer acquisition - meaning it effectively becomes part of your marketing.

Feedback is an opportunity

As highlighted by the recent Sainsburys "Giraffe Bread" episode, even the most innocuous piece of customer feedback can be an opportunity to not only improve your service but get some free publicity in the process.

Sainsburys cleverly capitalised on a story which went viral of its own accord, resulting in a flood of goodwill - but even the smallest business can get a bit of that magic by actioning a socially-engaged customer's feedback.

Engaging customers doesn't just mean idly chatting to them on your Facebook page - it means taking their feedback seriously and acting on it accordingly. Products like UserVoice and ZenDesk are widely used by SaaS companies so users can vote on which features they would like to see implemented next.

I would suggest going one step further, and introducing incentives for users who suggest useful features, in the same way that Google offers a cash bounty for people who identify bugs in their Chrome browser. Good will is reciprocal.

Good and bad are magnified

The oldest marketing adage, that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is now firmly outdated. The speed and volume of complaints on social platforms can be so incredible that one misstep can tarnish a company's reputation indefinitely, or in some cases destroy it completely. Jeff Jarvis has astutely labelled this phenomenon the "social media shitstorm".

One notable example involved an online magazine for male university students, UniLad. After publishing an article that seemed to espouse rape in cases where women fail to 'spread for your head', the magazine faced an understandable backlash. After several hours of sustained attack the magazine first took the article down, then its entire website, and has yet to return - the owner is currently facing disciplinary action from his university.

The flipside of bad publicity being very, very bad on social networks is that good publicity can be very, very good if something your company is involved in "goes viral".

All customers are not socially equal

A problem I - and I'm sure many others in charge of their company's social media activity - struggle with every day is the gulf in service levels between socially-engaged customers and everyone else. It is only logical that a company would want to address complaints on social media channels as a priority; they are more visible and therefore more damaging that complaints received via email or telephone. But is this the correct approach? Shouldn't all customers have a standard SLA regardless of their method of contact?

Some companies even grab the social bull by the horns and go to extravagant lengths to ensure they please loyal customers and those they deem to be "influencers". An American steakhouse

called Mortons once ferried a steak to meet one of their customers at Newark Airport after he jokingly tweeted in an order while boarding a flight. A fantastic customer service story, to be sure - but the cynic in me wonders if the steak would have arrived if that particular customer hadn't had over 100,000 Twitter followers.

In the past special treatment was reserved for the press and VIPs - not fair, perhaps, but expected. Now freebies are openly given to anyone with a high enough Klout score - even I with my measly 300 followers have been on the receiving end of a Business Class upgrade after a few kind words about the airline on Twitter.

All of the new rules I've outlined undoubtedly improve the customer service landscape, except this last one. As open, responsible companies do we have a duty to treat all of our customers equally? Targeting "influencers" may be a low risk, high-reward marketing strategy, but what of our customers who are not socially engaged? Do they not deserve the same level of customer service as those active on Twitter and Facebook, or is it fair to prioritise socially-active customers on the basis that they are more engaged with your brand and will likely promote you more actively?

The social rules of customer support have, up until now, been made for us by the social networks we populate - is it time we began making our own rules to make sure we, as companies, are acting responsibly?

Jon Norris is community manager for online accountancy firm Crunch. You can follow him on Twitter @Jn_Norris